“I’ve got something to say. I want the reader to be confronted with it,” he says. “The reader has a right not to like it, not to agree … But I don’t want people to be able to turn their head away in the same way that you pass a homeless person on the street.”

Marlon James, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, is working on an epic fantasy series that he describes as “an African Game of Thrones.” David Canfield at EW reports that the first book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, will be published by Riverhead in February 2019.

Frustrated with how “rare it is to engage with a story about LGBTQ characters that doesn’t involve death or illness or some identity-based misfortune,” Camille Perri argues at Electric Lit that we need more LGBTQ stories with happy endings: “Happy gay art or entertainment, or art and entertainment about happy gay people, may not be about politics — but the fact of its existence is political,” she says.